Youth and sustainable agriculture

Lilifontein school permaculture project, Cinsta.

 Youth and agriculture

Our friend Kerry, knowing what she did about perm culture and having made contact with a local school in her area decided to set about establishing a perm culture garden at the school. Lilifontein school cinsta, is known to be quite forward and innovative in  extra activities provided by the school for the children. One of these extra innovative activities is spending time with Kerry in her on site perm culture garden, and getting in touch with ground issues.

This is one of the first main stream schools that I’ve heard of that offers anything remotely to do with practical sustainable agriculture. This for Kerry was one of her greatest reasons for starting the project, that and a love for nature and care for the earth. Once a week for a period of about forty five minutes to an hour, the learners from their respective grades go to join Kerry in her garden, and learn about the sustainable agricultural practices of permaculture gardening.

Permaculture is not just about gardening and growing plants and food. Its about growing sustainable futures for whole communities through environmentally conscious design principles. Implemented in housing designs, in zones incorporating large scale farms to small apartment balconies. Permaculture is the solution to so many issues that we inhabitants of mother earth seek answers too. In this thriving school in Eastern Cape, learners are being taught the answers to a sustainable future.

What the children learn in these short periods with Kerry is invaluable skills and information, practical and theoretical knowledge of how to create and sustain their own food, income and livelihood. To grow food organically without pesticides or petrol chemicals you need a good understanding of the soil and earth organisms that you working with. This is where your biology comes in, for the understanding of the earthworms to the millions of microbial organisms and how they function in their environment is how good healthy food is grown. Geographically one needs observe the soil structure, feel whether its clay, sand or silt and then work with your biological understanding to create the optimum environment for your produce. Geographical knowledge teaches the know how of site mapping, working out co-ordinates for designs with relation to weather patterns, gradients and seasons. Maths for technical proportions, art for ascetics, history for past crops grown in the area and ground economic skills for transporting your produce from earth to plate.

This is just a basic idea of how fundamental sustainable agriculture can be to an aspiring school and innovative learners concerned with their environment. What’s surprising is that most people seem to think agriculture is not an art, or not a science and perhaps herein lies the crises with modern day agriculture. Over the last sixty years the injection of black gold or oil has transformed small scale hands on and family run farming into machine driven, oil guzzling agricultural industry.  It has created a great separation between the earth and the eater. The oil is rapidly running out, and our consuming ignorance about this limited resource is fast becoming apparent. We have grown such a dependency on oil that without it, life as we know it would be unrecognizable.

At Lilifontein school they have seen the importance of teaching the children the skills they need to learn today to save tomorrow. The model set up at the school is simple and almost all of the resources needed to set up the garden have been donated by parents or sourced free from the surrounding farms and area.

After the garden is designed, created and planted, the produce grown can be used by the children or sold for income. A small turn over of capital would be used to buy more seeds, tools or build a small chicken coup or stall from which the daily traffic of parents could purchase fresh organic vegetables and eggs grown and supplied by their children. The turn over of a school stall would benefit learners interested in economics and business, and budding entrapaneurs could fine tune their ideas with social market days and home made products like jams and dried fruits. All these elements of a communal school garden encourage a sense of community and bring people together.

These are simple skills all people benefit from. Real skills to provide them with the tools they need to live in a healthy society. Empowering them with the knowledge they need to fulfil their most important needs as people. Shelter, that is consciously designed to be integrated harmoniously in nature, good food and a healthy society, to share, work and live in. All these needs should be normal agenda for children to grow up learning, if not taught by their parents, then the institutions we call schools. With these skills people would never feel they could not feed themselves, house themselves and live in a sense of community with others and nature. Nature is abundant, and there is more than enough for everyone, provided the right attitude and management of the earth is encouraged through projects such as these.

Kerry’s work is a shining example of how we can make positive and necessary changes in our schooling systems. Changes that will benefit not only the learners, but the future generations and our home, planet Earth.

It’s a great job to have at the school, and Kerry would love the help of any interested parents to join her in furthering the school permaculture project. Any parent or interested teacher could start a project like this at any school. Good luck and green on!